About

This blog is about a Google Summer of Code project that aims to improve EclipseFP, the Haskell plugin for Eclipse. Read more about the blog, the author and the project in a series of three introductional posts.

About me

May 13, 2009 — Thomas ten Cate

I figured that the readers of this blog might want to know some more about me. If not, you can skip to the real stuff.

My name is Thomas ten Cate. I’m a 24-year-old Computer Science student at the University of Groningen, a wonderful town in the north of the Netherlands where I also live. I am about to finish my Master’s degree in CS, and I also have a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics.

My programming experience includes a lot of C++, a lot of Java (mainly for teaching) and also a lot of C#. I was taught Haskell in a university course on functional programming years ago. Unfortunately, that course did not go very far, so I have been learning me a real-world Haskell since. I cannot call myself a Haskell expert, but I am beyond the beginner’s level. For example, I do grok monads, but am still hazy on stuff like functors and arrows. I hope to learn much, much more about the language during this Summer of Code project.

Other experience includes half a year at the Interactions Lab at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, which gave me much valuable insight into human-computer interaction that will be useful when modifying and extending the user interface of EclipseFP. Furthermore, I run a one-man open source project called Taekwindow, which you might like if you are occasionally forced to use Windows.

I chose to do this Summer of Code project because I wanted to write something more serious in Haskell than the small programs that I’d toyed with so far. With that desire came the need for a good IDE. Kate is a nice editor, but it will not compile for you, or highlight errors, or run your program. I poked around the web and found that I seemed to be desiring something impossible. Then the Google Summer of Code came along and gave me an opportunity to try and make the impossible possible, so here I am!